Asahi: Gov’t worried about highly radioactive fish — Why are radiation readings still 100s of times over official safe limits?

Asahi: Gov’t worried about highly radioactive fish — Why are radiation readings still 100s of times over official safe limits?

Worries over highly radioactive fish prompt study

Persistently high radioactivity in some fish caught close to the Fukushima nuclear plant has sparked a government investigation into the physiological basis for contamination and why radiation readings in some specimens remain hundreds of times over the official safe limit.

[...] The overall trend has been a decline in detected amounts of radioactive cesium.

However, in August, two greenlings caught 20 kilometers north of the Fukushima plant were found to have cesium levels of 25,800 becquerels per kilogram, the highest level ever measured in fish since the nuclear accident. The government standard for food is 100 becquerels per kilogram.

And in March, tests recorded a level of 18,700 becquerels per kilogram in freshwater salmon in the Niidagawa river near Iitate [...]

[...] cesium in freshwater salmon and char caught since March has not been decreasing, leading to restrictions on the shipment [...]

The forthcoming study will analyze cesium levels in the fish’s otolith, a part of the inner ear. The otolith is widely used in such research because it is an organ where trace elements tend to accumulate over the animal’s lifespan, leaving a growth record that can be likened to the rings of a tree. [...]

The good news is that the radioactive water leaking from the plant will not be able to spread towards the Japanese inland and the Abukuma plateau due to the downward slope of the geological layers. The bad news is that there exists a fault which appears to be active right under the Fukushima Daiichi plant itself: this allows, and will continue to allow, radioactive pollution of aquifers over a depth of several hundreds of meters, as it runs through the different "waterproof" strata (4). This also means that the radionuclides will naturally be carried towards the sea by this underground water stream flowing through the permeable layers of sandstone. Sandstone is indeed the ideal rock for aquifers, as it is both permeable and fractured, providing easy movement of water. And finally, there is the problem of the type of rock on which the plant was built being rather "soft", meaning that an earthquake can only destabilize the buildings.

As early as March 31, 2011, Tepco announced that the groundwater was contaminated with radioactive iodine, according to an analysis of a sample taken at a depth of 15 meters under the first reactor (link). Today, if one or more coriums have sunk into the ground, this pollution has very likely been increasing.But Tepco no longer shares any information about the pollution of groundwater. Their only concern is to present a beautiful reassuring façade, which will never solve this disastrous pollution of soil and groundwater: underground contamination is irreparable, because there is no access to it.

Re: Asahi: Gov’t worried about highly radioactive fish — Why are radiation readings still 100s of times over official safe limits?

Right after this whole thing went down you could see that in the water near he plant it was a very green almost neon looking color. It looked like it was being realesed under water through some type of piping. I observed this on google maps. You can no longer see it, and finding the plant on google maps has become increasingly more difficult, at least or me.